Salons

Edgar Cota-Torres
Professor, Department of Languages & Cultures

The story of a Chinese dragon that merged with the earth and the sun in Mexicali

The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 led to significant Chinese migration to Mexico, particularly to border cities like Mexicali, founded in 1903. Chinese immigrants profoundly shaped Mexicali’s development, culture, and distinctive fusion cuisine, leaving a legacy that continues to attract tourists.

Édgar Cota-Torres (he/him) was raised in the border city of Mexicali, Baja California, Mexico. He holds BA and MA degrees from San Diego State University and a doctoral degree from Pennsylvania State University. He specializes in U.S.-Mexico border literature and culture and has received numerous awards and grants, including the Outstanding Teaching Award from the College of Letters, Arts and Sciences at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs (UCCS) and the Faculty Award for Outstanding Contribution to Diversity and Inclusiveness. He has been invited to lecture at universities and has published literary articles, poetry, and chronicles in the United States, Mexico, Costa Rica, Colombia, Martinique, Puerto Rico, Italy, Switzerland, Spain, and France. His first book, La representación de la leyenda negra en la frontera norte de México, was published in 2007. He is the founder and editor of New Borders/Nuevas Fronteras, an eighteen-volume collection featuring authors from different regions who explore the border through literary creation, reflection, and critical analysis. His latest book, Twin Cities. Una vecindad incómoda. La frontera Mexicali-Calexico como nota roja en la prensa californiana (1903–1915) (2023), is part of this collection.

Constantine Vassiliou
Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science

Humility: The Quiet Virtue of Free and Flourishing Societies

This paper is the penultimate chapter of a broader book manuscript that examines how Montesquieu, Adam Smith, Abraham Lincoln, C.S. Lewis, Reinhold Niebuhr, and MLK Jr. each emphasize humility as an indispensable virtue for statecraft and citizenship in liberal modernity. In pressing the classical liberal perspectives of Montesquieu and Smith against Reinhold Niebuhr’s Christian realism, this paper asks whether the 'quiet virtue' of humility can be recaptured in fully secularized liberal societies after being shorn of its classical and theological bases.

Constantine Vassiliou is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at CU Colorado Springs and a Faculty Fellow at the Center for the Study of Government and the Individual (CSGI). He is a political theorist and historian of ideas specializing in Enlightenment and American Political Thought. Vassiliou is the author of Moderate Liberalism and the Scottish Enlightenment: Montesquieu, Hume, Smith and Ferguson (EUP 2023). His current book project, Humility: The Quiet Virtue of Free and Flourishing Societies, primarily examines the theme of humility in the writings and rhetoric of Montesquieu, Adam Smith, Abraham Lincoln, C.S. Lewis, Reinhold Niebuhr, and MLK Jr. He has also published extensively on issues surrounding liberal and civic education in American universities.

Constantine research examines a perennial problem in modern political thought: how to balance commercial considerations with the public interest. He primarily approach this question through the writings of Enlightenment-era political philosophers whose proto-liberal theories of politics grappled with this tension, while also tracing how the challenge has been taken up in 20^th Century liberal thought.

Jordan Kokot
Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy

In Re|Pair”: Transhumanism, Brokenness, and Imperfection in Brain-Computer Interface

Over the past twenty-five years, there has been a dramatic increase in the efforts of private companies to develop invasive brain-computer interface (BCI) technologies and in public discussions of the futures that could be enabled by BCI. These efforts and conversations are often oriented around a set of claims about a) how BCI might provide medical care for people with severe injuries and disabilities, and b) how BCI might enable a “merging” with machines, which would allow humans to transcend biological “limitations,” including death. In this essay, I argue that these efforts depend on a series of problematic claims about human bodies and the nature of “repair.” Drawing from Emanuell Coccia, I argue that “brokenness” is a basic condition of embodied experience and changes to the human body that are coded in terms of a “return” to an idealized state or to transcendence smuggle with them pernicious colonial control ideologies. Instead, I offer a notion of “re-pair” that aims to better reflect the fragile vulnerability of our lived bodies. Re-pair casts medical interventions as a bringing together or more closely “pairing” of a human person with their environmental and community reality.

Jordan Kokot an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, Secretary of the American Society for Aesthetics (RMD), and an Instructor in the Philosophy of Technology at Harvard's Department of Continuing Education.  He is a philosopher of technology and a critical phenomenologist who has published on topics ranging from Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) and Virtual Reality (VR) to the phenomenology of noise.  He Is currently working on a manuscript titled Poetic Technology:  Time, Transgression, and the (techno)Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience.

Jordan specialize in the ethics of technology, aesthetics & the philosophy of art, the phenomenology of time, and social & political philosophy.  His current research focuses on the ethical, political, and phenomenological issues generated by the meteoric rise of modern digital and biomedical technologies. For example, He write and teach about how VR and XR technologies manipulate normative affordance structures within a broader techno-capital context, and how cyborg technologies (e.g., brain-computer interface like Neuralink) play into and deepen an ableist political aesthetic of cure. Jordan also is a co-curator of the multimedia art and literature journal, field|guide (book / IG )